Sarah Morewood
In 1983 Professor Michael Rogin of the University of California, Berkeley, was the first to suggest that Morewood was a model for the character of Isabel in Melville's dark novel of romance and ambition Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852).
[4] There, as Hershel Parker was the first to show, Sarah Morewood engaged in a flirtatious summer romance with Alexander Gardiner—President John Tyler's brother-in-law—and she soon came to be regarded in some local circles as "a married woman who permitted herself reckless friendships with men other than her husband.
After getting to know Sarah Morewood and Nathaniel Hawthorne during August, he abruptly decided to move his family to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, uprooting his young wife (Elizabeth Shaw Melville) from their home in Manhattan.
Combining her innate female warmth with a slightly affected appreciation for his novels (Omoo and Typee were at this point already critical successes, if not financial ones), she was irresistible to a man with a history of insecurities and anxieties.
"[11] Also cited are examples of their intimacy at parties, the gifts of books and bottles of Eau de Cologne that Morewood gave Melville, and their frequent outings in the countryside, including a summer night spent together in 1851 at the summit of Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts, where they were accompanied by a few friends, but not by their respective spouses.
"[20] In Booklist Donna Seaman observed, "Shelden presents the evidence gleaned through his assiduous research and performs a delving and convincing analysis of the sexual wellspring of Moby-Dick's violent energy and tragic majesty.
Riveting in its incandescent sense of discovery, intimacy, and velocity, Shelden's bound-to-be-controversial anatomy of a clandestine love transforms our perception of Melville and introduces one of the great unsung figures in literary history.
[24] Shortly after Sarah's death, Caroline Whitmarsh paid tribute to her in the local press as a woman of great intelligence and sympathy, and she specifically mentioned her power to inspire "men of genius.
